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Democrats vs. Government Unions
If late House Speaker Tip O’Neill’s famous saying that all politics is local has a corollary, it may be that politics is at its most…
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CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
The federal government took Thursday and Friday off to celebrate the holidays. Despite the rare three-day work week, agencies still published 25 proposed regulations, more…
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NLRB Advances against McDonald’s
By issuing complaints against McDonald’s on December 19, 2014, the National Labor Relations Board gave unions a boost and further riled business groups. On July…
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CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
69 new regulations, from washing machines to plants for planting.
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Besting a Billionaire: How a Grassroots Campaign Stopped a Ban on Internet Gambling
This week we get to say goodbye to the 113th Congress. For those who believe in free markets and individual liberty, it was a doozy.
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Poll: Two-Thirds of Americans Oppose Federal Gas Tax Increase
A new poll from Benson Strategy Group and SKDKnickerbocker found that 67 percent of Americans oppose increasing the federal gasoline tax by 15 cents, or an…
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Activist Science Undermines Research on Honeybees and Pesticides
As reported in a blog post by David Zaruk, some of the “science” on the impact of neonicotinoid pesticides on honeybees appears to have resulted from…
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CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
While Congress was busy with the 1,603-page Cromnibus bill (full text), agencies added nearly that many pages to the Federal Register with new regulations for everything…
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The 8 Amici (Part 2): Review of 4 More Briefs Opposing Breach of Joint-Employer Precedent
Joint Employer—Eight Amici for the Employers In total, 17 amicus briefs were submitted in June 2014, in the seminal National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) case…
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The 8 Amici (Part 1): Review of 4 Briefs Opposing Breach of Joint-Employer Precedent
Joint Employer—Eight Amici for the Employers In total, 17 amicus briefs were submitted in June 2014, in the seminal National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) case…
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Purple Haze, Seeing Red and Feeling Blue: The NLRB’s Crippling Overreach in Two Recent Actions
The National Labor Relations Board’s two recent actions cast aside decades of established practice and precedent. This disregard for the legal wisdom of consistency has…
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Political vs. Market Regulation: Uber Edition
Earlier this week The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell suggested that new entrants in the transportation market, like Uber, should face greater government regulation—despite having fueled much of…
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Lame Duck Quacks Needed Dodd-Frank Relief
Waaaah! That’s the sound of former House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) crying about stinging, bipartisan rebukes to his legacy of the Dodd-Frank…
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Congress Seeks Multiemployer Pension Reform in the CRomnibus
Congress seeks to reform multiemployer pensions in the CRomnibus (Continuing Resolution/Omnibus spending bill), which as of this evening remains in a precarious position.
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Indiana Supreme Court Upholds Right-to-Work Law
As the number of right-to-work states is expected to grow in the near future, the Indiana Supreme Court reaffirmed the legitimacy of the law in…
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Deteriorating White House Regulatory Disclosure Needs Active Congressional Review
Recently we’ve spent time reviewing Washington’s “Unified Agenda” of federal regulations, which came out just before Thanksgiving. It purports to tell what the alphabet soup…
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Rep. Leutkemeyer Moves to Choke off Operation Choke Point
The release this week of a new House Oversight and Government Reform Committee staff report into Operation Choke Point provides another opportunity to underline just how…
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New Minimum Wage Study: Tradeoffs Exist
Many progressives strongly support minimum wage increases. This is troubling, because the effects those increases actually have on many poor people are regressive. Signaling your concern for…
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The Future and the Regulated
Lawrence Summers, the enfant terrible of the economics profession, has written a thoughtful column on “Our Loss of Faith in the Future,” noting that…
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TTIP: Another Step in the (Lack of) Evolution in EU Trade Agreements
As the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) approaches an eighth round of negotiations between the United States and the European Union, the debate regarding…
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Gruber Testifies Before Congress on Obamacare Transparency Issues
Today, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Marilyn Tavenner and MIT economist Jonathan Gruber are testifying before the House Oversight and Government Reform…
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Small Business Regulations: Obama Red Tape Exceeds Bush Level
As we noted last week, President Obama has issued nearly half again as many “major,” $100-million regulations during his six years as President as George…
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11 Groups Urge Senators to Allow More Time to Consider NLRB Nominee McFerran
The Competitive Enterprise Institute and 10 allied organizations signed a coalition letter urging the Senate to delay the nomination of Lauren McFerran to the National…
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Competitive Enterprise Institute Event Highlights Department of Labor’s Crimanlization of Volunteer Work at For-Profit Businesses
The Competitive Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation are co-hosting an event on December 9th (see event details, here and below), which highlights the Department of…
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CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
While the number of new regulations last week was normal, their cost was abnormal, totaling well over half a billion dollars just for the four…
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Seven Quotes about Communism: Take 2
A few years ago I assembled several quotes about Communism that I thought would make good epitaphs for it. Unfortunately, the ideology has turned…
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Obama’s Major Regulations 50 Percent Higher than Bush
Back in 2012, President Obama emphasized that he had issued fewer rules in his first three years as president than his predecessor President George W. Bush.
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Labor Scorecard Alert: “NO” on NLRB Nominee Lauren McFerran
The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) will score the upcoming U.S. Senate vote on the confirmation of Lauren McFerran to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
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Rep. Tom Petri Invokes Bad Reagan Policy to Justify Increasing the Gas Tax
Yesterday, retiring Rep. Tom Petri (R-Wisc.) joined wacky Rep. Earl "United Streetcar" Blumenauer (D-Ore.) to endorse increasing the federal gasoline tax by 80 percent.
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Dodd-Frank’s Conflict Minerals Rules Increase Misery
Earlier, we wrote about the misery inflicted upon the Congo and millions of desperately poor people by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act’s “conflict minerals” provisions. A…
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“I’ll Gladly Pay Future Generations for my Pension Check Today”
“I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today” was the trademark utterance of J. Wellington Wimpy, the mooching character from the old Popeye cartoons.
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Fraternal Order of Police Once Again Opposes Internet Gambling Ban
Once again, the Fraternal Order of Police expressed their staunch opposition to a federal prohibition on Internet gambling. In a letter sent to Sens. Harry Reid…
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Wisconsin Public Employees Exercise Freedom to Choose
Wisconsin unions have spent the better part of the past three years denouncing Governor Scott Walker's signature public-sector collective bargaining reform law, Act 10.
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Towards a Humbler Monetary Policy
Is it possible for opposite policies to both be wrong? Over at the Washington Examiner, I argue that it is. The U.S. is ending…
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United Streetcar: The Solyndra of Transportation
Over the weekend, The Washington Post published a fascinating article about the rise and fall of United Streetcar, an Oregon-based manufacturer that owes its very existence to the…
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CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
Regulators had much to be thankful for during the short Thanksgiving work week, with new rules covering everything from grocery store ads to wireless signal…
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Thanksgiving and Markets
When the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony celebrated the first Thanksgiving on Massachusetts’ Cape Cod, they shared a feast with the Pokanoket tribe, in thanks to…
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Washington’s Thanksgiving Turkeys: Here Are All of the White House’s 200 Economically Significant Rules
As usual, the president will pardon a turkey again this year for Thanksgiving; For us turkey eaters, though, our federal holiday treat is lots and lots…
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Michael Mann Case Is about First Amendment, Not Global Warming
This morning the D.C. Court of Appeals heard oral arguments in Michael E. Mann v. Competitive Enterprise Institute, National Review, et al. CEI General Counsel…
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How to Reform an Antiquated Union Model
Vincent Vernuccio of the Mackinac Center has written a report that addresses the major problems of an American labor movement on life support.
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GAO: Union Official Time Costs Underreported
In October, the Office of Personnel Management released the long-awaited report that estimates the cost and amount of time federal employees spend on union activities…
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The Federal Register Topped 70,000 Pages Today
The Federal Register, where federal agencies’ daily rules, regulations, notices, “guidance,” bulletins and other material accumulate each day, just topped 70,000 pages for 2014. 70,052…
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New Field Study Confirms Neonicotinoids Have Little Impact on Honeybees
As the Ontario provincial government in Canada considers policies that may force farmers to stop using, or drastically reduce use of, a class of pesticides called…
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NLRB’s Mysterious New Member Dodges Important Questions, But Stresses Need for Fully Staffed Board
On December 16, Nancy Schiffer’s term on the National Labor Relations Board will end. Sharon Block was set to take her place but the Obama…
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CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
It was a bit of a slow week as these things go, but regulators still published new rules on everything from stress testing to sage…
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Adelson’s Online Gambling Ban Losing Political Steam
It was a bad week for Sheldon Adelson. The billionaire casino owner has said he’ll spend whatever it takes to stop the spread of legal…
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Taxpayer-Funded Green Ministries in Prince George’s County Violate the Constitution
Reporters like separation of church and state, unless it’s progressives violating it. Then, they lose interest in the concept. A recent Washington Post story cheerily reported on churches…
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President Obama’s Executive Overreach Compounded by Regulatory Dark Matter
In recent years the Federal Register has topped out at well over 70,000 pages, two times at more than 80,000. Each year over 3,500 rules issue from…
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A Big Payoff for Patient Investors
There’s a fascinating story in The New York Times this week about pharmaceutical companies and the process of discovering new drugs. Fifteen years ago, the…
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Corporate Action against Disease Points Way to Resiliency Strategy for Developing World
In a piece at The Freeman today, I examine how corporations in the developing world have reacted to the threat to their workers from diseases such…